The trade developed rapidly after 1641: more than one hundred voyages were undertaken in the following two decades.104 For the first time the purchase and sale of enslaved Africans was an explicitly stated objective in the charter of the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa in January 1663; an objective they met.105 By 1667, the Company stated it was delivering more than six thousand enslaved Africans each year to the English plantations.106 Few of these men and women were likely to have been obtained at River Cestos. When the Royal Africa Company was incorporated by Charles II in 1672, River Cestos was listed amongst the territories that their members had the right to trade with, but while other regions were mentioned as good places to acquire ‘negroes’, River Cestos was listed only as a source of ivory.107
While men like Dederi Jaquoah only spent a few months aboard English ships, travelling as passengers, other Africans found permanent employment at sea. Diego had become part of Francis Drake’s crew as a result of the Englishman’s vendetta against the Spanish, and many other Africans arrived in England as a result of less high-profile privateering activity while the two countries were at war. But what brought Africans to England after James I made peace with Philip III in 1604? The story of John Anthony, an African mariner of the port of Dover in 1619, shows that while some things had changed, much of what happened at sea and on shore remained the same.
* With creditors harassing him daily for payment of the £8,000 or more he had spent since arriving in London, Antonio was actually more concerned with the fact that Dassell hadn’t been paying him a share of his profits as the Guinea Company charter of 1588 prescribed.
8
John Anthony, Mariner of Dover
John Anthony was desperate to set sail for Virginia. The Silver Falcon lay at anchor in Dover harbour, ready, like he was, to depart as soon as they received word from Lord Zouche. They should have been at sea by now, on their way to buy tobacco from the colonists and to trade with the native peoples. They were to venture as far north as Canada. But terrible rumours had halted their departure. Word had reached England that the governor of Virginia and thirty of his men had met their deaths on the same route. It was said they had been poisoned by Spaniards when the Neptune stopped in the Azores. John Anthony had met plenty of Spaniards in his time as a pirate with Captain Mainwaring. He wondered that any Englishman had been so foolhardy as to accept their hospitality. When the news reached Dover, investors had withdrawn their funds and men previously keen to join the ship suddenly lost their appetite for the adventure. John Anthony viewed their cowardice with contempt. He ached to be back at sea, working, instead of this endless hanging around the port with nothing to do but spend money he didn’t have. Still the Silver Falcon did not fly.
THE YEAR THE Silver Falcon left Dover for Virginia, 1619, is significant in Black Atlantic History, for it was in August that year that the first enslaved Africans arrived in an English colony on the North American mainland. Yet that same year John Anthony was in paid employment aboard an English ship, recorded not only as a ‘Blackmore’ and a ‘Negar’ but also as a ‘mariner of the town and port of Dover’.1 What, or who, brought him to Kent?
Africans worked as sailors on English ships from Drake’s time to John Anthony’s and beyond. In 1625 a ‘negro called by the name of Brase’ helped a certain Captain Jones work his ship from the West Indies to Virginia.2 Africans were employed by sea captains in both Dover and London; the burial of an unnamed ‘blackamore of Captain Ward’s’* at St Mary’s, Dover, in November 1618 shows that John Anthony was not the only African present in the port.3 ‘John Come Quicke, a blacke-moore so named’, buried in November 1623 at St Botolph’s, Aldgate, had been a servant to Sir Thomas Love, a naval officer close to the Duke of Buckingham. His unusual name reflects the demanding nature of work on board ship.4 There were black sailors living in Stepney, like ‘Salomon Cowrder of Poplar a niger sailor’, who was married there in 1610, and Thomas Jeronimo, who died en route to the Philippines on the East India Company ship the Peppercorn in 1621 or 1622, having previously lived in Ratcliffe from about 1616 to 1618 with his wife Helen, who was also a ‘moor’.5
Cowdrer and Jeronimo may have been some of the first Lascars (sailors from the East Indies) in London; certainly there were Indians and South East Asians in the city by this time. John Saris took fifteen Japanese sailors to England and back on the Clove’s voyage of 1613–14.6 In December 1616, ‘an East Indian was christened by the name of Peter’ at St Dionis Backchurch, and in August 1623, St Katharine by the Tower saw the baptism of ‘Phillip, an Indian blackmore, borne in the East Indies at Zarat [Surat]’.7 Jeronimo was described as a ‘moor’, but his East India Company employ may indicate an Asian rather than African origin, while Cowdrer ‘came out of the East Indies’. This in itself is not definitive, as Africans were taken to the East Indies by the Portuguese, and later the Dutch, but also could have joined East India ships in London.8
In 1612, Captain John Saris described some of his men as ‘swarts’ [blacks] brought out of England’.9 The East India Company’s voyages provided a new route for African sailors to make their way to England. In an echo of Drake’s experiences in the Spanish Caribbean some forty years earlier, when the Company fleet arrived in the Philippines in 1621, ‘divers blacks and slaves had run away from the Spaniards and were keeping themselves in the woods, in hope of getting to the English ships’.10
After 1604 England was nominally at peace with Spain, and so the Crown stopped issuing letters of reprisal, but this did not deter some Englishmen from continuing to attack Spanish ships. As one sea captain observed, ‘those that were rich rested with what they had; those that were poor and had nothing but from hand to mouth, turned Pirates’.11 The early years of the seventeenth century saw a piracy boom, with bases appearing everywhere from Ireland to Morocco. By 1608, the ‘ocean waters’ were ‘swarming with pirates’; King James I ‘declared that they may possibly number five hundred ships’.12 This was the heyday of the ‘Barbary pirates’. Some were Moroccan, or moriscos, originally from Spain, but others were Englishmen based in Morocco.13 Prominent amongst them was Henry Mainwaring.
It is highly likely that John Anthony arrived in England thanks to Mainwaring, a man he referred to as his ‘worshippful master’ in 1619. Mainwaring was the scion of an ancient Shropshire family, educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, and the Inner Temple, who in the summer of 1613 took to the high seas in high dudgeon. He later claimed that he became a pirate ‘not purposely but by mischance’, but the English ambassador to Venice, Edward Wotton, told a different story. Wotton told the Doge of Venice that Mainwaring ‘went off in disgust’ after the Spanish ambassador, Don Pedro de Zuniga, prevented him from accompanying Sir Robert Shirley on an expedition to Persia. De Zuniga suspected the voyage was secretly bound for the West Indies, to attack Spanish shipping. Setting off with the Resistance and the Nightingale of Chichester, Mainwaring exceeded the ambassador’s worst fears. He ‘very soon found himself master of thirty or forty ships which he had taken, mostly at the expense of the Spaniards,’ with six or seven hundred men under his command.14 They made their base at Mamora [Mehedia], twenty miles north of Salé on the west coast of Morocco, at the mouth of the River Sebu. A popular pirate haunt, Mamora reportedly harboured forty pirate ships and 2,000 Pirates.15 Such was the extent of Mainwaring’s plunder of Spanish shipping that in January 1618 the Spanish ambassador, Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, Count of Gondomar, tried to recover 80,000 ducats from him.16 Two years later, when Gondomar visited him in Dover, Mainwaring ‘went to meet him on the beach, for which courtesy he said in jest, that he would excuse him [Mainwaring] twelve crowns out of the million he owed the Spaniards, if he would pay the rest’.17
John Anthony may have been captured aboard one of the Spanish ships Mainwaring took. During Mainwaring’s three years of piracy, more than 16,000 Africans embarked on slaving ships headed for the Spanish New World. Alternatively, they may have met in Mamora, or in Tunis, which Mainwaring haunted f
or some five months.18 At least one other African sailed aboard Mainwaring’s ships. In 1624, ‘John Phillip a negro’ testified that he had been with Mainwaring when they took a Spanish ship near Cape St Mary, south of Faro, Portugal, and carried her to Mamora.19 Pirate crews were, by their very nature, made up of men from a range of ethnic and national groups. One Plymouth ship raiding the Adriatic in 1604 and 1605 was ‘a ramass of rogues, some of Genoa, some of Savoy, some of Barbary, and the master of her is English’. In 1718, sixty of Blackbeard’s hundred-man crew were black. It has been estimated that by the eighteenth century up to 30% of pirate crews were of African descent, though this was partly because by this time the Caribbean was becoming the pirates’ preferred pillaging ground.20
For Mainwaring, Mamora was not long a safe haven. The Spanish sent a fleet of ninety-nine ships there in the summer of 1614 to clear out the pirates’ nest.21 When they arrived, Mainwaring was in Newfoundland, acquiring new recruits and supplies from the fishing fleet. On his return, with four hundred new crew members, ‘many volunteers, many compelled’, he simply relocated to Villafranca (now Villefranche-sur-mer), near Nice, in the south of France.22 The Duke of Savoy had declared Villafranca a ‘free port’ in 1613 and according to the Venetian ambassador to Savoy, it had since become ‘an asylum and refuge for all scoundrels, offering safety to everyone of whatsoever sect, religion, creed, outlawed for whatsoever crime’.23
Mainwaring achieved the greatest feat of his Mediterranean sojourn on Midsummer’s Day 1615. ‘5 sail of the King of Spain’s men of war’ came upon two of Mainwaring’s ships, intent on his capture. Against the odds, the pirates inflicted a bruising defeat on the Spanish, killing many of their men and causing ‘great hurt’ to their ships. The battle was won by Mainwaring’s exceptional seamanship and the superior range of his guns. The pirates were able to inflict serious damage on the Spanish ships while remaining beyond the reach of their broadsides. The Spanish were so ‘roughly handled’ that ‘they were glad to withdraw from the contest’ and retreat to Lisbon.24
Pirate ships were thought to be an excellent training ground for developing nautical skills, and John Anthony would have gained considerable experience by sailing with Mainwaring. Life aboard Mainwaring’s ships was strict (or so he later told James I). His men were ‘the most uncivil and barbarous seamen’ and yet ‘by constant severity’ he ‘kept them all in a short time in so good obedience, and conformity’, that he ‘never had any outrageous offence, but had them all aboard my ships in as good civility and order’.25 According to the Venetian ambassador Pietro Contarini, who was considering recruiting Mainwaring, he was unsurpassed in ‘nautical skill, for fighting his ship, for his mode of boarding and resisting the enemy’.26 Contarini later added that ‘for nautical experience and for sea-fights, and for a multitude of daring feats performed afloat, he is in high repute, being considered resolute and courageous, and perfectly suited to that profession, understanding the management of first-rates [the largest ships] better, perhaps, than anyone’.27
The pirate later distilled his knowledge into a ‘Seaman’s Dictionary’ of nautical terms that would form the basis of many a maritime manual.28 His exploits soon became the stuff of legend. Jean Chevalier, a neighbour of Mainwaring’s on the Isle of Jersey in the 1640s, dined out on the story that once, ‘being attacked by a superior force, and his shot expended, he beat off the enemy by loading his guns with pieces of eight’.29
John Anthony’s adventures with Mainwaring came to an end when, under heavy diplomatic pressure from France and Spain, James I issued an ultimatum: if Mainwaring did not immediately desist and return to England, the King would send an English fleet against him.30 Given Mainwaring’s legendary prowess and the comparatively lacklustre performance of the English navy in the period, it is a little surprising that the pirate chose to call it a day.31 The rulers of Spain, Savoy, Florence and Tunis all extended offers of pardon. In Tunis, Mainwaring could have followed in the footsteps of another notorious pirate, John Ward, who retired to live like a king in ‘a faire palace beautified with rich marble and alabaster stones’.32 Mainwaring did dine with the Dey of Tunis, ‘a very just man of his word’, who ‘swore by his head (which is the greatest asseveration they use) that if I would stay with him he would divide his estate equally with me, and never urge me to turn Turk’.33 Yet in the end Mainwaring chose to return home, weary, perhaps, of the exigencies of life at sea, his desire for both adventure and riches well sated.
John Anthony probably arrived in England in the winter of 1615, either in November via Ireland, where Mainwaring waited while the negotiations over his pardon took place, or by sailing direct to Dover aboard one of the pirate’s ships in December.34 And as far as we know, John Anthony lived in the town from his arrival in the winter of 1615 until the spring of 1619. His master, and all who sailed with him, were formally pardoned in June 1616. Mainwaring’s ‘principled’ avoidance of attacking English vessels, and efforts to free various Englishmen from captivity may have helped his cause. He himself claimed this ‘patriotic’ approach rendered his piracy a ‘Pulchrum Scelus’ (an honourable crime). James I may also have been in a forgiving mood, perhaps hoping that Mainwaring, who allegedly had enough silver to use it as ammunition, might be persuaded to pour some into the royal coffers.
In the early seventeenth century, Dover was a thriving port with a population of some 3,000 people. The town was the leading member of the Cinque Ports, a confederation formed by Sandwich, Romney, Dover, Hythe and Hastings, plus the two ‘ancient towns’ of Rye and Winchelsea, which retained certain privileges in return for providing men and ships to the Crown. Dover had once had six parish churches, but after the Reformation it had only two: St Mary’s and St James’s. The famous white cliffs towered over the town, atop them the imposing Dover Castle, the Key to England. Situated at the easternmost extremity of Kent, Dover was then, as now, the ‘most easy, speedy and convenient [place for] passing into France and other foreign ports beyond the seas’. As Walter Ralegh wrote to Elizabeth I, ‘no promontory, town or haven, in Christendom, is so placed by nature and situation, both to gratify friends, and annoy enemies, as this town of Dover’. Its harbour, well-fortified against those enemies, was always busy with travellers and merchants. Both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I had spent considerable sums to improve the harbour, which had a natural tendency to fill with silt, as well as being vulnerable to ‘the raging of the sea’ and ‘frequent and furious storms’. In 1606, James I transferred responsibility for the port’s maintenance and improvement to a forerunner of the Dover Harbour Board, saving the Crown from further expenditure.35
Other Africans arrived in England as a result of piracy around this time. As we saw in Chapter Two and Chapter Six, in the summer of 1608 an African boy joined the crew of William Longcastle, Captain of the Ulysses, who had him christened. To be more precise, the pamphlet account of Longcastle’s trial states that he had ‘bought’ the African ‘to be his boy’ less than a month before he attacked the Susan of Bristol off the coast of Safi, Morocco, on 12 July, so the boy, whose name is unrecorded, must have joined Longcastle’s ship in the second half of June. In the normal course of events, the boy might have returned to England with Longcastle, but the Englishman accidentally left him behind in the Ulysses when he made off with the Susan to the West Indies.36 The master of the Susan, Anthony Wye, was also left on the ship and it was he who took the boy to England. The boy provided damning testimony against Longcastle in the winter of 1609, but after that he disappears from the record.
Another African who came to England in this way was a man named Diogo. In 1607, the twelve-year-old Diogo was captured near the Canary Islands while on his way from Lisbon to Bahia, Brazil, with a Portuguese man called Luis Vaz Paiva. Diogo was sold in Algiers to a pirate named Camarit, who converted him to Islam and gave him the name ‘Tombos’. For the next seven years, Diogo served Camarit as he attacked European vessels in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. He was then taken by an English pirate capt
ain, with whom he sailed for four months until the Englishman decided to return to home and throw himself on the mercy of the Crown. He was pardoned by the King in 1614, and his crew was allowed to disembark. But after only four months in London, Diogo headed for Lisbon once more to seek his original Portuguese master, Francisco de Paiva Mercado.37 His arrival in England seems to have closely mirrored John Anthony’s, but while Diogo chose to leave, John Anthony decided to stay.
By 1619, John Anthony was working as a sailor aboard the Silver Falcon of Dover, a small, light pinnace of 40 tons. Henry Mainwaring had commissioned Phineas Pett to build the Silver Falcon in the summer of 1616. Pett was a well-known shipwright, who had made ships for Drake, Ralegh and King James I at his yard in Chatham. He had even produced a miniature boat for King James’s son, Prince Henry, who died aged eighteen in 1612.38 Mainwaring had asked Pett to build the Silver Falcon on behalf of Edward, Lord Zouche, warden of the Cinque Ports and a senior member of James I’s Privy Council. A veteran of Elizabeth I’s reign, Zouche was one of the signatories of Mary Queen of Scots’ death warrant in 1587.39 On 6 August 1616, Pett sailed the finished ship from Woolwich to Dover with Sir Walter Ralegh and his sons, Henry Mainwaring, and others aboard. Quite possibly John Anthony was also present, and was part of the Silver Falcon’s crew from the beginning.
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